rl stands sadly in need of some
matronly adviser."

"I remember Captain Hunsden," Lady Kingsland said, thoughtfully, "and I
remember this girl, too, when she was a child of three or four years.
He was a very handsome man, I recollect, and he married away in Canada
or the United States. There was some mystery about that
marriage--something vague and unpleasant--no one knew what. She ought
to be pretty, this daughter."

"Pretty!" Sir Everard exclaimed; "she is beautiful as an angel! I
never saw such eyes or such a smile in the whole course of my life."

"Indeed!" his mother said, coldly--"indeed! Not even excepting Lady
Louise's?"

"Oh, Lady Louise is altogether different! I didn't mean any
comparison. But you will see her to-night at Lady Carteret's ball, and
can judge for yourself. She is a mere child--sixteen or seventeen, I
believe."

"And Lady Louise is five-and-twenty," said Mildred, with awful accuracy.

"She does not look twenty!" exclaimed my lady, sharply. "There are few
young ladies nowadays half so elegant and graceful as Lady Louise."

Miss Silver's large black eyes glided from one to the other with a
sinister smile in their shining depths. Her soft voice broke in at
this jarring juncture and sweetly turned the disturbed current of
conversation, and Sir Everard understood, and gave her a grateful
glance.

The young baronet had gone to many balls in his lifetime, but never had
he been so painfully particular before. He drove Edward, his valet, to
the verge of madness with his whims, and left off at last in sheer
desperation and altogether dissatisfied with the result.

"I look like a guy, I know," he muttered, angrily, "and that pert
little Hunsden is just the sort of girl to make satirical comments on a
man if his neck-tie is awry or his hair unbecoming. Not that I care
what she says; but one hates to feel he is a laughing-stock."

The ball-room was brilliant with lights, and music, and flowers, and
diamonds, and beautiful faces, and magnificent toilets when the
Kingsland party entered.

Lady Carteret, in velvet robes, stood receiving her guests. Lady
Louise, with white azaleas in her hair and dress, stood stately and
graceful, looking from tip to toe what she was the descendant of a race
of "highly-wed, highly-fed, highly-bred" aristocrats.

But at neither of them Sir Everard glanced twice. His eyes wandered
around and lighted at last on a divinity in a cloud of misty white,
crow